Measuring Success - The Arsenal (Emery) Barometer

Am I the only one that is perturbed that it took Emery all season to realize he has to fit our best four attackers on the pitch in their best positions? This includes his spat with Ozil only for dude to look exactly the same as he did before Emery decided to pay him 5 million dollars to make Instagram posts?

 

From a coach who reportedly provided a detailed analysis of the Arsenal roster and how to improve the players in his interview.

 

No, you aren't the only one. It has been a source of frustration for a lot of us. It's a knock against him, and it seemed so obvious to me. However, I still want to judge him holistically.

 

The way we been playing the last few matches could have been earlier in the season.

We could potentially have distance on Spurs if he played to our strengths in the fall. He is getting a pass because fans only care about the last result but I’m more upset that it took him this long to say we should play our best players in their positions.

 

Could your help me understand your basis for this thought, Prince? I normally agree with your opinions, but this one is odd to me.

We lost to City and Chelsea right at the start, then went 21-22 without a loss in all competitions, and most of those were wins (albeit against lighter competition).

 

I've been wondering if many of his line-up decisions during the packed middle of the season weren't a simple result of rotating players to allow them to last through a whole season.

For instance, lots of people were slamming him for not playing Laca & Auba together more. The last 2 matches he's done that but otherwise it's generally been pretty rare I think.

Maybe with just 10-13 matches remaining in the season, and an 18 day break before our next match, that combined to make him feel more comfortable "over playing" his 2 strikers in the past week.

IOW, now that we're on the home stretch, almost out of the woods, maybe Emery's throwing more caution to the wind for the run-in. (Wow that was a lot of cliched metaphors for one sentence!)

Maybe he would've liked to have done this a lot more (e.g. 2 strikers) but was taking the prudent, conservative approach... managing player fitness & longevity?

 

I’m talking late fall into last few weeks.

 

I have said numerous times that I believe we are at our best offensively when PAE & Laca play as a ST pair. That said, our roster is not setup to allow us to play that way too often seeing as how we have zero quality depth behind those 2. I realize we have several other needs this summer but it wouldn't hurt my feelings to see us go after a quality young ST that could rotate with those 2 so we can spend more time in a 4-4-2 diamond, 4-2-2-2 (my favorite) or 3-4-1-2.

 

If Roma, the dumbasses that they are, give up on Patrik Schick, then we should be all over him.

 

Being a glutton for punishment I decided to listen to Emery's post-match presser from yesterday's trouncing by Wolves. Several times he said something like "the big thing is to recover our possibility". God knows what that means! And is it truly the "big thing"?

Even with a bit of an end-of-season implosion, he's just about exceeding preseason expectations. I heard somewhere that he's got the best return from his first 50 matches than any previous Arsenal manager... true? Anyway, I'm still supporting him.

And I continue to respect his braveness, his lack of insecurity, in conducting his pressers 100% in English. BUT he seems to be the master of using many words without actually communicating very much. I so look forward to him attaining a high-intermediate mastery of the English language, but I'm starting to wonder if that may not happen. Or even if it does, maybe we won't learn much more???

 

Sort of, but that's in part because of 12 Europa League matches. We need to win our last three games to match last season's points total, a total which got Wenger fired.

 

Yup. We've already exceeded that by 3pts, with 9pts still to play for. Not sure what @mebeSajid is smokin these days.

 

You can rightly criticize Wenger for many things, including tactical flexibility, player transactions, etc, etc. But when it comes to intelligent, informative and entertaining press conferences, he was at the elite level!

 

I brain dead. That's what I get for mindlessly parrotting claims from Twitter. Should be 2016-2017.

I still think we're worse as a team under Emery and were better under Wenger. Emery was a bad hire.

 

How many of us saw Emery as the long-term savior manager, rather than as simply the first step in a post-Wenger transition? I certainly didn't.

With that and other factors in mind, I think he's just about exceeded expectation for the season... so far.

That said, we've lost 3 out of our last 4 league games. And if we lose the next and final 3 games, and if United wins just 1 of theirs, we finish 6th... the worst we can do at this point. Then if we also get knocked out of Europa by Valencia, then I'd say he'd have fallen just short of expectations.

Edit: OTOH, if we win a European trophy and/or finish 4th, then of course his first year will be a clear success.

5-6 games to go in our season overall, so let's just see how it turns out before judging him. As Jitty said, the margins are very fine.

 

I think Emery's been too cautious by far, especially away from home, and that's really cost us. And we saw it really early in the season at Stamford Bridge, where we would have gotten at least a point but for Emery parking the bus in the second half.

 

Yup. That's been bugging me for a long time. And not just Emery. Late-Wenger sides used to do it too. I've generally thought the best way to play is to play to the max offensively, for every game. Dominate them, high-press them, take away their oxygen, etc. Sure it's traditional in this league (and most if not all others) to play differently at home vs away, but I've never liked that tradition.

Countless times we've gone up 1-0 and then sat back, trying to preserve. And I'd be talking to the TV saying "no, no, that's too risky for our defense... go for a 2nd, and then a 3rd"

Of course I realize that not all squads are good enough, or fit enough, or big enough, to do this. The intensity is super high. In the EPL, Man City seems the best example of this, the closest to achieving it. And obviously Arsenal are quite a few miles away from their level, but a big part of me still aspires to playing the same way... home and away. Dream on I guess.

 

Its why Pool and City are clear top. They go hard home and away, and make teams respond to the way they play. None of this attack at home and be coy away.

 

Liverpool are only as good as their next mistake and have had great luck with injuries.